Link Analysis Tools

Link Analysis Tools

Link analysis is a field which has lost a bit of its importance over the past couple years. Google has clamped down on paid links, web directories, and article directories. At the same time more people are blogging online, and more webmasters have become aware to the field of public relations and the value of links. These combine to make it is much harder to catch up with a competitor if you are trying to duplicate their link building strategy.

To some degree link analysis has moved away from PageRank and anchor text toward analyzing news in the marketplace and understanding why stories are spreading (link analysis is evolving into media analysis and public relations). Here are 6 of my favorite link analysis tools

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
2. Google Blog Search
3. Google Webmaster Central
4. SEO Link Analysis
5. Xenu Link Sleuth
6. Advanced Link Manager

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google and Microsoft generally show rather limited link data to the public. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows a much deeper and more representative sampling of inbound link data.

SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a free Firefox extension that adds link anchor text, PageRank score, and if a link is nofollowed to Yahoo! Site Explorer results.

Google Blogsearch

While Google tends to show a small sample of backlinks their Blogsearch is much better at detecting new links from blogs.

Google Webmaster Central

If you verify you own a website inside Google Webmaster Central, they will allow you to download a list of links pointing at your site. If you notice your rankings for a keyword are decent (but could be better) you could look through some of the people linking at your page and ask them to link at your page using more specific anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu Link Sleuth crawls websites looking for broken links. This helps you keep your website maximally clean and functional by finding any broken internal links and any references to documents that are no longer online.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is a paid software package starting at $199 which allows you to automatically track new backlinks obtained by competitors. It also crawls pages to find anchor text, if the link is using nofollow, and the PageRank score of the linking page.

We also created a free tool somewhat similar to Advanced Link Manager, named Backlink Analyzer. We have not updated our tool in a while though, and it is sorely in need of an update.